Computer Science Open House brings youth and parents to campus on February 22, 2013 (Expired)

On February 22, 2013, the University of Regina hosted an open house on Computing Literacy. The event brought a steady stream of parents and youth to campus where they learned about Scratch programming, robots and more.

Scratch is a simplified programming language that makes programming computers easy for children or youth. It provides a
visual programming environment for making interactive
stories, games, music, and art. Using Scratch is fun and it provides a great introduction to
programming.

The open house honoured "Canadian Computing Education Day", which was proclaimed by the Canadian Association of Computer Science/Association d'Informatique
Canadienne to occur on Feb. 22 this year. The event was part of the national program initiated by CACS/AIC to emphasize the importance of computing. For more information on Canadian Computing Education Day, see www.CanCompEd.ca/events/.

Conveniently, Feb. 22 was also Scratch Day Canada, which made the choice of Scratch particularly pertinent.

The event highlighted some current challenges in Computer Science education:

Communicating exciting careers that
involve computing,

Renewing curriculum to ground every student in
computational thinking and computing and